Special Report

Mueller’s Thin Gruel

He produces one indictment irrelevant to the collusion claim and another that refutes it.

“The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” said Vladimir Lenin. Today’s Russian leaders, in light of Hillary’s graft, could update the saying and give it an ironic twist: the socialists in America will sell us the materials with which we will bomb them.

That blatant quid pro quo — Hillary Clinton and her cronies in the Obama administration signed off on giving Russia 20 percent of America’s uranium production after her family foundation received millions from Russians in the uranium industry — cries out for a special investigation. Making the appearance of the sale even worse is that it is now known that the approval of it came at the very moment the Obama administration knew all about the Russian uranium industry’s bribery practices.

Yet when Trump brought this up during the campaign — “Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved the transfer of 20% of America’s uranium holdings to Russia, while nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton foundation” — the media shrugged. Suddenly cooperation with Russia didn’t look so bad. Now the media is giving a similar shrug to Hillary’s secret payments to a former British spy who used Russian smear merchants to try to torpedo Trump’s candidacy.

The commentariat’s windy warnings about “foreign interference in our elections” have ended and been replaced by discourses on the propriety of “opposition research,” the value of which is determined not by its origin but by its accuracy. So say the same Democrats and liberal pundits who spent a year whining about the accurate information released by WikiLeaks on the Podesta emails. Hillary is still sore at the press for not averting its gaze from that accurate information. She actually argues in her campaign memoir that the media had a duty not to report on improperly obtained and released information, regardless of its authenticity. Instead, it should have been reporting on false charges made by a “well-respected” British spy, she writes, without informing her readers that he was on her payroll.

All of this is rich fodder for investigation. But, instead, we get a lumbering investigation from an overrated ruling-class darling that so far has yielded one indictment completely irrelevant to his supposed Trump-Russia focus and another that actually undermines it. Robert Mueller’s Manafort indictment is so far afield it doesn’t even relate to Trump. Ironically, it implicates the lobbying outfit co-founded by Hillary’s campaign manager, the Podesta Group. John Podesta started it with his brother Tony, who joined forces with Manafort to lobby for the Ukrainians and now finds himself in the crosshairs of Mueller.

Meanwhile, the Papadopoulos indictment involves a self-important Trump campaign volunteer who haplessly lied to the FBI about his own foolish free-lancing. George Papadopoulos was a twentysomething unpaid volunteer who belonged to a foreign policy advisory group that met with Trump a grand total of one time. All that is known about Papadopoulos is that he pestered Trump campaign officials about meeting with the Russians and was turned down each time. If anything, his email exchanges with Trump officials dramatically refute the collusion claim.

According to the Washington Post in August, Papadopoulos’s pestering “sent a ripple of concern through campaign headquarters in Trump Tower.” The paper continued:

Campaign co-chairmen Sam Clovis wrote that he thought NATO allies should be consulted before any plans were made. Another Trump adviser, retired Navy Rear Adm. Charles Kubic, cited legal concerns, including a possible violation of U.S. sanctions against Russia and of the Logan Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens from unauthorized negotiation with foreign governments.

From the feverish questioning about Papadopoulos yesterday by the media, one would have thought he occupied an office at Trump Tower. In fact, he was just one of countless volunteers whom the Post in August described as a callow nuisance: “Less than a decade out of college, Papadopoulos appeared to hold little sway within the campaign.… His entreaties appear to have generated more concern than excitement within the campaign.”

The circumspection of the Trump campaign stands in striking contrast to the hubris of Hillary’s. About the Trump side, we hear a lot of chatter about proposed meetings that never happened or rejected offers of information. Yet on Hillary’s side lies the glaring fact that she paid for foreign dirt to influence the outcome of the election.

The Mueller investigation may go down as one of the ruling class’s most audacious misdirection plays. We know with certainty that one government tried to tip the election — ours, via the Obama administration’s probes and “unmaskings” of the Trump campaign. And we know with certainty that one candidate colluded with foreigners to alter its outcome — Hillary. But on whom does the focus fall? The one candidate in the race who relied on old-fashioned campaigning to win.